Trouble at Tessei

Abstract

In 2005, Teruo Yabe is asked to revive Tessei, the 669-person JR-East subsidiary responsible for cleaning its Shinkansen ("bullet") trains. Operational mistakes, customer complaints, safety issues, and employee turnover are at or near all-time highs, even as the demands on Tessei continued to grow.

Given previous leaders' failed attempts to fix Tessei's problems with increased managerial monitoring and controls, Yabe seeks a creative approach to overcome the motivation, capability, and coordination challenges facing his organization. Like many contemporary leaders, he selects transparency as his tool. He is, however, unique in adopting a highly nuanced approach to implementing transparency. In the process, he not only leads a fantastic organizational turnaround but even helps to make otherwise "dirty" work more meaningful for Tessei front-line employees. The case therefore presents students, particularly in leadership, organizational behavior, operations management, and service operations courses, with an opportunity to think through how a well-crafted transparency strategy can act as a powerful leadership tool.

Related Work

In 2005, Teruo Yabe is asked to revive Tessei, the 669-person JR-East subsidiary responsible for cleaning its Shinkansen ("bullet") trains. Operational mistakes, customer complaints, safety issues, and employee turnover are at or near all-time highs, even as the demands on Tessei continued to grow.

Given previous leaders' failed attempts to fix Tessei's problems with increased managerial monitoring and controls, Yabe seeks a creative approach to overcome the motivation, capability, and coordination challenges facing his organization. Like many contemporary leaders, he selects transparency as his tool. He is, however, unique in adopting a highly nuanced approach to implementing transparency. In the process, he not only leads a fantastic organizational turnaround but even helps to make otherwise "dirty" work more meaningful for Tessei front-line employees. The case therefore presents students, particularly in leadership, organizational behavior, operations management, and service operations courses, with an opportunity to think through how a well-crafted transparency strategy can act as a powerful leadership tool.

People often feel malicious envy, a destructive interpersonal emotion, when they compare themselves to successful peers. Across two online experiments and an experimental field study, we identify an interpersonal strategy that can mitigate others’ feelings of malicious envy: revealing one’s failures. People are reticent to reveal their failures—both as they are happening and after they have occurred. However, in two experiments, we find that revealing successes and the failures encountered on the path to success (compared to revealing only successes) decreases observers’ malicious envy. This effect holds regardless of whether the individual is ambiguously or unambiguously successful. Then, in a field experiment set in an entrepreneurial pitch competition, where pride displays are common and stakes are high, we find suggestive evidence that learning about the failures of a successful entrepreneur decreases observers’ malicious envy, increases their benign envy, decreases their perceptions of the entrepreneur’s hubristic pride (i.e., arrogance), and increases their perceptions of the entrepreneur’s authentic pride (i.e., confidence). These findings align with previous work on the social-functional relation of envy and pride. Taken together, our results highlight how revealing the failures encountered on the way to success can be a counterintuitive yet effective interpersonal emotion regulation strategy.

This paper investigates whether people exhibit last place aversion in queues and its implications for their experiences and behaviors in service environments. An observational analysis of customers queuing at a grocery store, and three online field experiments in which participants waited in virtual queues, revealed that waiting in last place diminishes wait satisfaction while increasing the probabilities of switching and abandoning queues. After controlling for other factors, people in last place were more than twice as likely to switch queues, which increased the duration of their wait and diminished their overall satisfaction. Moreover, people in last place were more than four times more likely to renege from queues, altogether giving up on the service for which they were queuing. The results indicate that this behavior is partially explained by the inability to make a downward social comparison; namely, when no one is behind a queuing individual, that person is less certain that continuing to wait is worthwhile. Furthermore, this paper provides evidence that queue transparency is an effective service design lever that managers can use to reduce the deleterious effects of last place aversion in queues. When people can’t see that they’re in last place, the behavioral effects of last place aversion are nullified, and when they can see that they’re not in last place, the tendency to renege is greatly diminished.